Re: right-justification of uid's/gid's is a mistake.

[Paul Eggert]

Bauke Jan Douma <address@hidden> writes:

>> One possible change would be to right-adjust the numbers, but to have
>> their right margin be at a minimal location.  That would cause the
>> output to have the "clean formatting" that you suggested, while still
>> preserving the right-adjustedness of numbers in the example above.
>
> I'm not sure I follow you here -- what format string would that
> be in C?

There isn't one :-).

Here's a sample output to give you an idea:

-rw-r--r--  1 eggert eggert 0 2004-04-17 21:38 a
-rw-r--r--  1 root   eggert 0 2004-04-17 21:38 b
-rw-r--r--  1  1002  root   0 2004-04-17 21:38 c
-rw-r--r--  1 10000  10000  0 2004-04-17 21:38 d

The basic idea is that the numbers all are right adjusted, but the
longest number is left-aligned with the names.  This is as opposed to
the current approach, where the longest number is right-aligned with
the longest name.  Note that there will still be leading spaces with
some numbers (as in the "1002" above), but there will be fewer leading
spaces than there are now, and all the numbers will still line up.

> Anyway, I saw some talk the other day about having a --format
> option for 'ls' and others.

Yes, that's the long-term solution.